


Waiting for the summer rain

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [57]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:14:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29338869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: Vinnie is feeling good.And so is Sonny.
Series: The Roadhouse Blues [57]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1069713





	Waiting for the summer rain

Sonny got up in the morning and looked at the mess, sighed, and made a phone call. By the time Vinnie finally dragged himself out of bed, he had two suitcases waiting for them at the door, and an egg sandwich for Vinnie.

"Get dressed, we're getting out of here."

"What?"

Sometimes it drove Sonny crazy how long it took him to wake up even once he was vertical, but he'd had a bad day yesterday so Sonny spoke gently. "Put your clothes on and come on."

"Is somebody after us?" Vinnie asked. He was still just standing there, hunched from sleep and looking like he was going to fall over.

"Yeah, a cleaning crew. I want us gone before they get here."

"Is that a metaphor?" Vinnie asked. "Cleaning crew?"

Vinnie was always seeing metaphors, metaphors and anarchy. Sonny wondered if there was a connection, if metaphors caused anarchy. "No, it's people who clean. Did you hit your head yesterday?"

"I'm asleep. I only got up to take a piss, I was going back to bed."

"Well, now you're not," Sonny told him. "You can sleep at the hotel."

"What hotel?" Vinnie was squinting at him as though trying to absorb a lot of foreign concepts all at once.

"I'll tell you about it in the car if you put your clothes on."

"And if I don't put my clothes on you won't tell me?"

"If you don't put your clothes on, I'll throw a blanket over you and tell you nothing."

Vinnie shook his head. "Who could resist an offer like that?"

Sonny had wanted to stay at the Rennic for a long time; it was gorgeous and classy and it looked really comfortable. And he needed a vacation.

"A suite?" Vinnie asked, and he was laughing. Sometimes he had no idea why Vinnie thought things were funny. What was funny about a hotel suite? So Sonny just ignored him. At least he was laughing. He seemed OK.

Vinnie didn't go back to bed. He did take a shower, under what they called a rainfall shower. He seemed to like it a lot.

He'd eaten his sandwich, but Sonny knew he was still hungry, so he ordered a couple of big breakfasts from room service.

"I could have just cleaned up the mess," Vinnie said. He was dry, dressed, shaved, bright-eyed and seemed . . . OK. Like he hadn't had a meltdown the day before. "I know how to work a broom and dustpan."

"I wanted to take a vacation," Sonny said, "and I heard San Francisco was a good vacation spot."

"Oh, yeah? We're going sightseeing?"

Sonny hadn't really thought of that, but it didn't sound like a bad idea. "Sure, why not?"

So they spent the day looking at stuff. It wasn't very interesting, but Vinnie was in a good mood. They had a long, expensive lunch, then Vinnie insisted they had to stop in a toy store. It sounded weird, but Sonny didn't want to argue with him. He kept saying nothing happened, but nobody flipped out like that over nothing happening.

Anyway, he bought a Monopoly game, which was smart. They both liked Monopoly. Their last game got left behind in Arizona, but most of the hotels were missing by then. "And if you can't buy hotels, why would you even want to play?" Vinnie asked, laughing.

He was OK now. He was going to stay OK.

Only things were weird. Vinnie wasn't cheating and he got upset when Sonny cheated. Something had changed and Sonny didn't know if it was because of what had made him tear up the apartment or if it was something else, and if it was something else, what was it?

It didn't matter—the game didn't matter, it didn't matter if they cheated or played by the rules. Sonny could go either way. He just wanted to know what happened.

They abandoned the game for bed, and when he got up in the morning, Vinnie was gone.

Sonny never used to worry when Vinnie disappeared. Before it was always after an argument or because he was in a bad mood. Now he was just suddenly gone without an explanation and there wasn't anything Sonny could do because he didn't know where to look for him and San Francisco wasn't Demming, New Mexico, it was huge.

He was about to drive over to the park Vinnie liked so much before hitting some used bookstores when Vinnie came back into the suite, carrying two big, heavy shopping bags.

"Where have you been?" Sonny demanded. "Why did you sneak out before I woke up?"

"I didn't sneak, I just went out."

"Where?" The bags were from Macy's. "You went shopping?"

"No, I needed to go to the bank." He wasn't upset. He seemed placid, but not in that dishrag way he used to be. Sonny tried to calm down.

"No, you didn't," Sonny said.

"I didn't? I'm pretty sure I did." Now he sounded mocking, which he only ever sounded when he was mad as hell or feeling playful, and he didn't sound mad. So maybe he was OK today.

"The only thing you get at a bank is money," Sonny said reasonably, "and I'm paying for everything, so you didn't need to sneak out to go to the bank. Wait, are you telling me those bags are full of money?" What the fuck?

"I didn't sneak anywhere," Vinnie said, laughing a little. "And I needed to show you something."

And then he dumped out more money than Sonny had ever seen. 

"Money?" Sonny asked. "You needed to show me money? Why? I've seen money before. Where did you get it?"

"Not this money, not most of it. May I sit on your bed?" He didn't wait for an answer, just plopped himself down. He was such a smart ass sometimes. There was only one bed.

"Sit down," Vinnie invited. "I want to tell you something."

Sonny sat and Vinnie started talking.

"So this," Sonny pointed to the smallest stack of bills, "is what you've saved up from what I gave you." They were in tidy bundles held together with rubber bands.

"Yeah," Vinnie said. He was annoyed that Sonny had interrupted him so much, so now he was going to make Sonny drag it out of him.

"And this," Sonny pointed to the stacks of bills still in their bank wrappers, "is what your stepfather sent you." He remembered when the bonded messenger had arrived with it.

"Yeah. I've never even opened it. I'm not 100% sure how much is in it."

"A hundred thousand dollars," Sonny said.

"How can you tell?"

"They're fifty dollar bills, the bank wrappers have never been broken, there are a thousand dollars in a bundle, you have two bundles. You didn't know that?"

"I knew they were fifties and that there were two bundles," Vinnie said. "How do you know there are a thousand bills to a bundle?"

"I know stuff," Sonny said. "You never had a guy come into your office and drop eighty of these on your desk to clear his account."

"When I was with you, I never had an office," Vinnie said. "And I've been meaning to speak to you about that."

"Oh, yeah? Did Susan Profitt give you an office?"

"I didn't get my own office until I was running Dead Dog."

"Did you want an office?" Sonny asked it the way he'd have asked Theresa if she wanted a mink coat. "You can have one."

"I can afford my own office, I don't gotta wait for you to give me one," Vinnie said.

"Obviously. And the rest of this is—what? You made it off your paper route?"

Vinnie looked at the big mess of bills scattered on the bed. "No. And it's not your skim money, either."

Sonny frowned at him, laughing. "Of course it isn't! There's thousand dollar bills there, you can't skim thousand dollar bills! Why would you think I thought that?"

Vinnie shrugged. "Well, Frank thought it."

"What?" Sonny was getting more lost. Vinnie had a bunch of money he obviously wasn't supposed to have and McPike knew about it and didn't care? And it didn't bother Vinnie any that McPike thought that. What the fuck?

"This is Mel's money. Some of Mel's money. Roger scooped up a shitload of it right before Susan got locked up, I don't even know how much. He gave me a bunch before he disappeared."

"Why?" Sonny asked, then, "And you told McPike about it? And you've still got it?" Just more proof people did things for Vinnie that they really, really shouldn't. McPike was an untouchable, yet he knew Vinnie had ill-gotten gains and hadn't confiscated them. What next?

"I had to tell Frank because I gave him some of it."

"You mean there was more? Wait, you gave him some and he took it?" Maybe McPike wasn't an untouchable after all.

"Yeah. I gave it to him so his wife could get a new liver."

There wasn't anything Sonny could say to that. No matter how you felt about a guy, you couldn't mock him for saving his wife's life. "Did he know you had more?"

"He figured. But once he'd taken it, he really couldn't say anything."

Yeah, that was Vinnie. He's rope you in—not because he was trying to trap you—but then you were stuck. "But why did Lococco give it to you? I mean, this is—" There was so fucking much of it.

"First, you gotta understand how much money Roger took. This—" Vinnie motioned at the cash "this is like if the captain of the Titanic gave you a few ice cubes for your drink, it's nothing. It's like Jesus talking to the rich man about the poor woman giving her pittance to charity—"

"It's proportional," Sonny said. "I get it, I'm not stupid."

"Right. Then, you gotta understand how things were. I was the only one trying to help Roger. They were collecting wood for the fire to burn him at the stake. They didn't want me to testify for him, or if I did, I had to keep my cover, which—yeah, some East Coast hood saying Roger was a good guy, that would'a done a lot of good. I had to threaten to quit. So there was that. And working for Mel was like falling down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I thought Rog and me were the only sane ones there, and sometimes I wasn't sure both of us were sane, but I wasn't sure which one of us was crazy. We'd been to war together. He was getting chewed up by the machine; he gave me the money so the same thing wouldn't happen to me."

Sonny understood that. It was a lot like how he'd felt when they were fighting Pat the Cat. There was a comradeship that developed that never went away. He'd thought Vinnie felt the same way, but he wasn't going to ask.

"So why didn't you tell me about it?" Sonny asked.

"I did tell you about it, I told you in Milan that I had two million dollars. I even showed you the safety deposit box key.

Yeah, he had. And it wasn't that Sonny hadn't believed him, exactly. It wasn't the least bit unlikely—you'd have to be an idiot to walk out of the destruction of Mel Profitt's organization without some money in your pockets. And if this Lococco had been trying to fund a revolution, he'd have needed big pockets and a wheelbarrow.

It was just—it sounded like an exaggeration, the way you say you've got a million things to do, or a million relatives coming over. If a guy said that, you wouldn't go to his house expecting the whole neighborhood crowded with a million people. But apparently Vinnie really had two million dollars.

"So this is Profitt's money."

"Yeah. Mel's and then Roger's and now mine. I don't know if this was cash he had stashed someplace that Roger scooped up, or if Roger cashed some bearer bonds, or—"

"No," Sonny said. "No, the bank didn't give him this money. Not unless he spent a lot to get it. And Profitt didn't come from old money, did he?"

"Mel came from trash," Vinnie said, which didn't sound like him. "He and Susan were found in a dumpster. He didn't have a bankbook on him."

"This is weird," Sonny said. He picked up a stack of thousands. A stack of thousands; those weren't words you expected to hear yourself thinking. "Do you know how long it's been since these were in circulation?"

"Yeah, I know exactly how long. That's why I don't get where they came from."

"Oh, you can get 'em," Sonny said. "Mack gave me a thousand for my birthday once. I mean a thousand dollar bill. It was a joke, kind of—you know, like how an aunt'll give you a nice, crisp dollar bill. You can get 'em, but you gotta talk to the right people in the right way."

"Or let your money do your talking for you," Vinnie said.

"Yeah, that works too."

Vinnie laughed. Sonny didn't know why exactly, but he laughed too. It was hard to wrap your brain around. He had money, lots of money, but it was more like credit, it existed but he used it in theory. But this was real, bunches and bunches and bunches of green bills. It was like the difference between knowing you could have any beautiful girl you wanted and having a dozen of them pile naked into your bed one night.

"It was in the back of a closet in my house in Brooklyn and I forgot about it. And I don't expect you to believe that."

But Sonny did believe him. Nobody else in the world could've forgotten they had a small fortune tucked away, but Vinnie could.

"I didn't think of it again until you dumped me in New York and I was trying to decide what to do. You gave me enough cash, and I still had a credit card, but my money was in my safety deposit box, so I had to come back here. That led me to remembering I'd left this behind a loose board in my mother's house."

"What if somebody else had gotten there first?" Sonny asked.

Vinnie shrugged. "Since I haven't perfected my time machine yet, there wasn't anything I could've done about that. Anyway, it wasn't likely. Rudy hadn't sold the house, and nobody's gonna mess with the place while he's alive. Or while people think he's alive. Who knew being alive was a matter of public opinion."

That was the kind of thing he used to say right before he started crying, but today he seemed to find it funny. Sonny was confused, but in a hopeful way. He looked at the three bunches of money. Only the Profitt money was a mess. "You've been keeping track of how much money I gave you? Why?" he asked.

Vinnie flipped a hand. "It was incidental. You nearly always gave me small bills, so when my wallet got too full, I'd go change them for a fifty or a hundred from Mel's money. I wasn't keeping an accounting, I just . . . I dunno. Mostly, I was bored. It was like a cousin of mine, she was real little but she wanted play Monopoly with us. She'd change her money into fives because she liked the pink money. That was her favorite part of the game. Usually she'd get bored after that."

Sonny shook his head. He didn't know that much about little girls, but that sounded about right.

"Did you change your mind?" Sonny asked.

"About what?"

"In Milan, you said you were going to give me your money but you changed your mind. I wondered if you'd changed it again."

"No. The point of giving it to you was to prove something."

"You wanted to prove you're rich?" Sonny was very puzzled.

"I wanted to prove that I'm here because I want to be, not because I have to be. I have more than enough money of my own, but I'm not going anywhere."

Sonny didn't understand any of this. Why was Vinnie talking about going away? "OK. Message received."

"Not now! Back in Milan! When I first came back from New York, I was going to do that, only you disappeared in the middle of the night."

"It wasn't the middle of the night," Sonny said. "And I didn't disappear. I just went out for a while."

"You flew to Italy! I just went out for an hour or so and I never left the city!"

Sonny laughed at him.

"Whatever. We played Marco Polo for a while and I forgot my idea."

"But you remembered this morning so you went and got your money to show me." Sonny looked at it. "Very nice. You should tidy up that big bunch there and put it someplace safe. Hell, when we were in Italy, you should've said something, we could'a swung by and got you a Swiss bank account."

"That's not a bad idea," Vinnie said, "but that's not what I'm doing right now. I got the money out today for two reasons: to show it to you because I want you to know I trust you, and because I want to try something different."

"You want to do it on a pile of money, like in the movies?" Sonny asked.

Vinnie laughed. "Maybe later. No, I want to play another game of Monopoly, only using real money. We start off with nothing. We toss the Get-Out-of-Jail-Free and Go-to-Jail cards. You only go to jail if you get caught cheating, only you can't roll your way out. That costs a grand. If you don't have a grand, the game's over and you've lost and you turn your money back in. But the winner gets to keep whatever money he's got, including cashing out his property."

Vinnie seemed very proud of this idea, and it did sound like fun, but it didn't make any sense. "So, what's it cost to buy in?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, we got plenty of cash here, but unless I put in half, you can't win anything. The money's already yours. Doesn't sound like much fun for you."

Vinnie didn't seem to have thought of this, which just went to show you. "Look. You know I don't care about the money. You think it would be fun to win a bunch of money off me, but I'd think it was just as much fun if it was play money and I just won the game. I like the game. This way it's fun for both of us."

"Are you sure about this? I don't want to take your money away from you."

Vinnie laughed. "Take my money away from me," he said with some contempt. "Give it your best shot."

Sonny lost five games in a row. Vinnie kept trying to look under his side of the board, but nowhere did the rules say he could and he didn't have a warrant. Then Vinnie lost because he couldn't pay the Luxury Tax and Sonny won eight grand. Then he won again with no profit at all and decided to play the next game straight.

Only first they decided to go out for a while, and while they were out Sonny bought a paper—which Vinnie confiscated the financial section of so he couldn't do any work—and he noticed there was a Humphrey Bogart marathon in town and they decided to go.

There were six films: _The Petrified Forest, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep,_ and _In a Lonely Place._ They were running them twenty-four hours a day for a week. Vinnie asked the kid at the concession stand why, but he didn't know. They bought popcorn and watched from the end of _Casablanca_ through _The Big Sleep._ Vinnie wanted to stay for _In a Lonely Place,_ but they were both hungry and Sonny told him they could come back the next time they showed it and stay through _The Maltese Falcon._

"Which one's your favorite?" Vinnie asked him on the drive back.

" _Maltese Falcon,_ " Sonny said.

"Me too," Vinnie said. He still sounded happy, but then he said, "I want to tell you what happened."

"What happened when?" Sonny asked.

"With Tracy."

"I know what happened with Tracy and believe me, it won't happen again."

"You don't gotta do that. She had questions she wanted answers to."

"She doesn't get to have questions," Sonny said. "It ain't her life."

"No, but she does love you."

"I don't care." Sonny was going to change the subject but he was curious. "Questions about what?"

"Well, about how her father died. She thought I might have let him die."

"Fuck," Sonny said, very low. "Stupid."

"You never thought that?" Vinnie asked.

"You saved my life. Why would you do that and let Dave die? Anyway, they shot him in the head, point blank." He knew that was true, but he didn't know how he knew because he didn't remember it. "Didn't they?"

"Yeah, I saw it."

"And you told me?"

"Yeah," Vinnie said, "I told you, not long after it happened. You've got retrograde amnesia from when you were shot. It was Dave I was after," he added, "but not to kill him."

"Yeah," Sonny agreed. They'd been over this, but maybe Vinnie didn't remember. "Your training officer, I remember."

"I wasn't there to kill anybody," Vinnie said. This was where he'd usually start getting too emotional and go off the rails, but he sounded fine.

"Can we please change the record?" Sonny asked. "I'm tired of this one."

"She wanted to know about Lorenzo, and had Tony San Martano really killed him."

"What, did she think you were behind it? She really is nuts."

"She wanted to know why you were marrying Theresa."

"Oh, for God's sake. OK, what else?"

"She wanted to know why you hired me and why you came when Rudy asked you to. And how I talked you into helping me escape."

Sonny laughed at that. "She doesn't understand anything. And she doesn't need to."

"Why did you hire me?"

"You weren't scared of me," Sonny said, "but not because you were too stupid to be. You just seemed right. And I was bored and you weren't boring. And Aiuppo didn't ask me anything, it was an order. But I wasn't going to let them lock you up."

Vinnie smiled. He looked really happy.

They went back to their game. Vinnie kept landing on jail. He didn't have to stay, but it was slowing down his property acquisition and Sonny was getting way, way ahead of him. He didn't seem to care.

The best part of the game—besides the money he ended up with—was finding out that Vinnie stole property. There were times Sonny had a sharp longing for the old days, but it was always trivial stuff, finding out how smart his smart, smart Vinnie was. Property! Nobody stole property. But Vinnie did.

They debated the relative merits of ordering dinner from room service or going out, or maybe ordering take-out from someplace else. Vinnie suggested a Polish place he'd seen, which Sonny thought was hilarious, so why not? What was Pollock cuisine, anyway?

Apparently it was mostly borsch and pierogi—which was like ravioli only the dough was thicker and heavier, and they put Polish things in it.

Vinnie ordered a bunch of different kinds, but they all had the same stuff in them—cabbage, potatoes, cheese, potatoes, mushrooms, cabbage, cheese, kielbasa, cheese, potatoes, onion, cabbage, potatoes, and cheese.

"This tastes like Czechoslovakia," Sonny told him. It wasn't bad; in fact, it was good peasant food, the kind that would fill you up so good at lunch you didn't think about dinner the whole afternoon. But Sonny could have done with less cabbage, and it needed oregano or something.

"Czechoslovakia doesn't exist anymore," Vinnie said. "Maybe it's the beer, it's from the Czech Republic."

"Yeah, that must be it."

Vinnie put down his fork. "Listen, I want to tell you what happened."

"Didn't we do that already?" Sonny asked. He cut into a pierogi and looked inside: cabbage, just cabbage. What was this obsession the Pollocks had with cabbage? 

"No, I mean inside. The reason I—got so upset."

"You don't have to tell me anything," Sonny said, chewing.

"No, for you I don't, but for me I do. I need to know you know."

"Yeah, OK," Sonny agreed. He put down his fork.

Vinnie rubbed his eyes, then with them still squinched closed, "There was this kid, Gene Couzins. There were other kids before him, some of 'em survived, some didn't, it was a game with these guys, you know? They probably took bets or something. But this Couzins—I was right there. I was right there when it happened and you know what tipped me off?" Not a real question so Sonny stayed quiet. "I heard laughing! I heard those freaks laughing! So I put a stop to it." Vinnie stopped, opened his eyes, looked at Sonny with that same furious confrontational air he'd had when Sonny found him trashing the apartment. "Go on," he challenged.

"What do you mean, go on? You're the one telling the story."

"No, c'm'on, tell me what an idiot I am, trying to save some kid I didn't even know! You always thought I was an idiot!"

Sonny needed to shut this down before Vinnie started trashing the hotel room and demanding Sonny hit him.

"Just because I don't get why you do this stuff doesn't mean I think you're an idiot." He half-laughed. "Just because I call you an idiot doesn't mean I really think you're an idiot! Are you gonna finish your story or what?"

That seemed to get him back on track. "Yeah. Well. He still ended up in the infirmary, but so did deVoss. I knew they'd be after me, but I had some protection and I was careful. Just not careful enough. They caught me alone with their sharpened toothbrushes, had me up against a wall with my pants down when the guard that was supposed to be looking after me finally shows up. Nothing happened but I puked for three days, and when Tracy said deVoss's name, I lost it, I don't know why."

"You keep saying nothing happened to you when something did, just because it could've been worse. I got shot. I didn't die, but that doesn't mean nothing happened."

That seemed to take the anger out of Vinnie. "You're right. I just—what right do I got to be a mess over stuff that could've been so much worse?"

"I don't think it works like that," Sonny said.

"It makes me feel weak." He was starting to sound belligerent again.

"You found out you weren't Superman, bullets don't bounce off your chest. And it was because you were trying to help somebody in trouble, that's supposed to be a really brave thing to do, right? It's why cops and firemen get medals."

"I don't think you understand."

"I think I do but you don't like it. You want to keep beating yourself up over this. Do you even get that you didn't do anything wrong?" Vinnie looked like he wanted to argue so Sonny switched gears. "If somebody told you this story, would you call him weak?"

"No," Vinnie said slowly. "No, I—no."

"So what makes you so special?"

"What do you mean, special?"

"Well, if you heard this story from somebody else, you'd let them off the hook because they reacted normally. Why aren't you allowed to act normally?"

Vinnie just frowned at him for a while. "Did you get that out of one of those books on crazy people?" he finally asked suspiciously.

"Yeah!" Sonny said proudly. "Some of those shrinks are pretty smart."

And Vinnie laughed.

"Are we good now?" Sonny asked.

"We're good. And I had an idea," Vinnie said.

"I'm not playing real-life Clue with you, I told you," Sonny said

"No, I mean a big idea." This was promising. When had Vinnie last had an idea? "I want to give away the money. Not all of it, just the money that was Mel's. And I want to use the rest to open up a garage."

Sonny speared another pierogi and put it on his plate. When he cut into it, there was more cabbage. He looked at Vinnie's plate, saw he had kielbasa and onion, and took a couple of his.

"Hey!"

"All I'm getting are cabbage!"

"Do you think the dinner's rigged?" Vinnie asked.

"I don't know, I just know I am not eating all the damn cabbage!"

Vinnie took one of the extra plates the restaurant had sent and dumped all the pierogi onto it, then sliced each one in half. "There! Are you happy now?"

"Yeah," Sonny said, "that's a good idea. What time's the movie start?"

"Not 'til ten. You're not going to say anything about my idea?"

He put a piece of the kielbasa in his mouth and once he'd swallowed it said, "OK. Are you getting rid of it because of where it came from or because of how you got it?"

"Neither one. I want what I do to have weight, I want it to matter if I'm not good at it. I want there to be consequences. I don't want to funnel money into a losing proposition just because I have the money to do so."

"Can't you just not do that?" Sonny asked.

Vinnie sighed. "I don't know. Are you going to let me starve if my garage goes under?"

"Nah, I'll look after you." He waited a beat and added, "I'll even let you drive for again so you can earn your keep."

"You are all heart."

"I keep tellin' ya. I'll give you cabbage for dinner every night."

Vinnie snorted a laugh. "Well, there's an incentive right there."

"Did you want to watch _Jeopardy!_ before we got to the movies?" Sonny asked. He loved watching Vinnie watching _Jeopardy!_ Any demonstration of Vinnie being smart made him happy. It was like watching a bird fly or a good racehorse run; it showed who and what he was.

"Yeah, sure. You know what I'd really like?"

"What?"

"Let's skip the movie tonight, go tomorrow. I'd like to turn in early."

"Sounds good to me."

This Vinnie was more than happy to tell him to go fuck himself if he didn't like what Sonny said. He'd never let himself be pushed around. Yeah, he still fell apart if you put enough pressure on him, and it wasn't as much pressure as you might expect. But it was OK. This was his Vinnie.


End file.
